Timberborn Review (Sum0)
A stellar city-builder somewhere between Rimworld and Cities Skylines. The kind of game you fire up for an hour and next time you look up, it's 1am and you're plotting a new system of floodgates to irrigate the expanding farming district.
I love how challenging-but-fair Timberborn is, at least as a new player, and how fun the mechanics are to learn as you blunder through the early game. Even in the prosperous times, you're only a bad drought away from mass famine, dehydration and sweeping death. At one point my prosperous community of 100+ beavers was reduced to under 30 after a bad famine, which led to really interesting gameplay as I worked out how to start again from nearly nothing.
There are all these mechanics that are so satisfying in a niche way. For example, many buildings can be stacked, so you can create these wonderful multi-layer abodes that wrap satisfyingly along a cliff edge or mountaintop with stairs and walkways zigzagging between them. I'm also a sucker for fluid simulation so building dams and tweaking floodgates is loads of fun.
Once you get your head around districts, it feels great to start a new area for farmlands, an academic outpost, an industrial hamlet, and send the initial colonising party to build it all up from nothing.
However ... past that, once you get a decent number of districts in the mid-game, it starts to become micromanagement hell with the trading system.
There are dozens of resources - wood, food, materials - which are all handled individually and transported by individual beavers, very slowly and in small quantities, from trade posts to drop-off points. Just to exchange a few types of food between 4-5 districts will require at least 15-20 trade routes to be manually set up - and then the same again for building materials. It is really difficult to balance, so you get districts where, for example, wood is just piling up and others where they are constantly running out. So you have to set up another trade route to redistribute the wood, but by now, food is running out, so you have to build more trade depots (each depot can only handle 10 trade routes), but all the beavers have died from starvation so there's no one to carry anything... The trade depots are also huge, and to build just two or three takes up a ton of valuable space in a district.
It kind of sucks all the fun out of it to be honest and I can't really be bothered to continue the game right now. However - I am very hopeful that, as a game in early access, the developers can work out the kinks. I would still recommend it even with the above in mind.